All things novelling-related as I embark on my self-publishing adventure

A recent reviewer of The Syndrome Diaries said the book made her want to go and dig out her Nirvana albums. A mention of an album or a song can dredge up many associations for the reader, so I wanted to talk about putting music in writing, rather than just listening to it while you write.

My central characters in the novel are the same age as me, and the music references in the novel will be familiar to anyone with a bit of a penchant for early 90s indie/alternative. The Wedding Present’s release of a single a month in 1992 crops up, the characters dance to PWEI’s ‘Defcon One,’ New Model Army get several mentions (because they’re still my absolute favourites) and one scene takes place at a Senseless Things gig. That might not seem an obvious choice, but I needed a band who toured at the appropriate timepoint and who played a gig in Leeds. That took some trawling through weblinks, and I thought I’d hit gold with Carter USM, those staples of Student Union discos, until I read the tour schedule and discovered they’d played every single town in the UK except Leeds – it almost looked as if they’d purposefully avoided it to spite me.

Music is fundamental to many people’s identities. For Bourdieu in Distinctions, music preferences are used as cultural capital – a means of displaying status. In Club Cultures, Sarah Thornton develops a theory of subcultural capital which subverts social hierarchies, with particular reference to the dance music scene of the late 80s and early 90s. Reading these books now, the dynamic nature of music and identity is striking. Does classical music still confer social status? I’d argue that memories of Spike Island are, among many of us, more respected (here’s an explanatory link for my Dad).

I found that putting many of these songs on a playlist while I wrote Syndrome helped me get into the writing zone. Other songs were contemporary, but seemed to resonate somehow – Hearts and Minds, by Exit Calm, for example: whether to follow your head or your heart is one of the central themes. Some songs had dual resonances: New Model Army’s Green and Grey is on Thunder and Consolation, which is namechecked early in the novel, but also reminds me of my time as a student in West Yorkshire, the frequent rain, and many a “bus-ride that meanders through the valleys of green and grey” (NMA have associations with nearby Bradford).

Ultimately, the catalogue of music running through the novel may say more about me than any of my characters, but I hope it’ll resonate with at least some of my readers too.

There seems to have been a lot of talk of introverts recently, with books extolling our virtues making best-seller lists. Like many writers, I generally prefer my own company to that of others. I like to meet up with people, but after an hour or so, begin to feel drained.

We’re still often seen as needing help, or viewed negatively. One friend said she considered introverts by definition to be selfish – but isn’t needing other people to be around you more selfish? We seem to be seen as problematic because we don’t fit the majority view of what’s desirable. I’ve realised that I tick a lot of boxes for schizoid personality disorder simply by being an introvert, which is something that therapists think should be ‘fixed’ (no, I don’t need fixing. I’m not broken). I’m not sure whether this is lack of understanding or an urge to pathologise for profit’s sake.

I’m quite capable of social interaction when required. I’m not shy. I’m not desperate to belong or be accepted. My instant reaction when receiving social invitations is ‘How can I wriggle out of this without seeming rude?’ A couple of hours with a friend? No problem. An evening with a crowd? No thanks. But if I need to mingle, I can do so perfectly competently – with some effort, I have to admit.

As Anneli Rufus observes in Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto, introversion is regularly associated with crime. Serial killers are often described as ‘loners,’ but this may be misguided: they are more likely to be outcasts, who want to join in but are rejected. Introverts are quite happy on their own, thank you very much. To add some balance, here’s a youtube thingy of Sister Wendy Beckett, a nun who’s had several TV series in the UK on art appreciation. I heard her interviewed on the radio over Christmas for Desert Island Discs, and she figured the only thing she’d miss on a desert island was attending Mass – other than that, the isolation would be a huge positive for her. Someone once said to her that she was the only person he knew who was perfectly happy without other people – “And it wasn’t a compliment,” she said.

Reading Rufus’ book has made me question my preferences. Why do I love my evenings at my writers’ group? (Because you can sit and listen, in your own little world, and there’s no pressure to make polite conversation). Why do I enjoy running in a group? (Because you can trot along, in your own little world, and nobody’s capable of non-stop talking because they need the breath) Why am I unfazed by public speaking, or leading an exercise class, but freeze when asked to play piano to an audience? (I really have no idea. Any suggestions?)

As far as writing goes, introversion is probably an advantage: it’s quite an isolated activity. It’s also possibly the reason that so many of my characters are relative introverts too. I can relate to them. I found writing India’s dialogue and diary entries in The Syndrome Diaries the most challenging part of the novel, as her extroversion was quite alien to the way I am.

Do you identify more as an introvert or extrovert? Do you think it affects the way you write – in terms of your writing activity, or the content?

Sometimes, life gets in the way of writing. I just moved: it wasn’t intentional, but as I’m currently renting and the owner of the property passed away, the tenancy ended. So, I embarked on househunting and moving madness and all the accompanying admin, made rather more challenging by my husband being abroad for the duration.

In some ways, it wasn’t such a bad thing. It was a well-timed fresh start, as it’s been quite difficult to let go of ‘The Syndrome Diaries’ and get stuck into a new project. However, I really ought to have been marketing on full throttle as Christmas is a peak time for book purchases and for people to receive empty Kindles. And I didn’t. I also did almost no work on my PhD, at a time when I ought to have been promoting a study (if you’re planning on starting an exercise programme in the first quarter of 2013, you can take part: info is here and the link to sign up is here – that’s my shameless plug done for this blog).

So how many copies of Syndrome have I sold recently? Erm, not very many. But I received my first royalty payment! It wasn’t huge, but to have earned money from the novel is such a fantastic feeling. It was a bit like crossing the finishing line the first time I ran a marathon. And in many ways, the same principles are involved: consistent effort, keeping going when you have a setback and never giving up.

So I haven’t given up. I’ve taken a couple of old bits of writing along to the writing group, and had my first stab in many years at writing a short story, inspired by this rather wonderful book. And four seven-hour flights in a month (two visits to hubby) have given me lots of reading time, which is great for inspiration. So I may have slacked off, but I’m re-energised and raring to go in 2013.

Once The Syndrome Diarieswas uploaded to Amazon, it was live within hours. There was a huge temptation to carry on fine-tuning the content and to hold back on publicity: one of the hardest things about publishing is letting go of your baby, knowing that it could still be better. Everything can be better, but there’s a danger of editing and editing and never letting the novel leave home. So I emailed, tweeted and facebooked.

One sale. Just one person wanted to read my book.

At first, I was downhearted. Then I was confused: I knew at least three people had bought it. They’d told me. Then I realised: the reports analyse by territory. The default report is for .com, but there are separate figures for .co.uk. It was a huge relief to find the drop-down menu and see 7 more sales.

The toughest aspect of publishing has been the marketing. I get annoyed by repeated tweets so didn’t want to make that mistake, but I’ve probably been too cautious. So far, I’ve tweeted once for the ebook launch, once when I got the paperback proof and once when it received its first review (five stars!). I think I can probably get away with a little more than that. I generated some interest at a local reading event, though I spent more on other people’s books than I made on mine. Still, is that really so bad? I like reading as well as writing.

I’d love to share my sales figures, but my Amazon contract forbids me from doing so and I’d rather not get on the wrong side of my main sales channel. The rumoured ‘whoosh’ of sales hasn’t materialised, but the word is spreading, and the feedback has been positive. One frequent comment has been that the person doesn’t have a Kindle, so I’ve been blowing the trumpet for the free Kindle smartphone app. Originally, I was only going to publish an ebook, but a few people encouraged me to try Lulu.com’s print-on-demand service. I’ve had to price the paperback at £7.95 to cover costs, which is a little high to generate impulse purchases (the ebook, at under £2, is more likely to do that) but it’s out there if anyone wants it! It was easy to take the Word document I’d prepared for the ebook and tweak it for Lulu, and I was lucky that the cover art I’d designed for the ebook doesn’t require a high resolution and actually looks pretty good as a hard copy. Other than my proof copy (about £8 including postage), I’ve not paid anything to make it available.

Self-publishing has to be considered a long-term project, with gradual awareness-raising alongside more novel-writing. And that’s fine. I’ve had loads of fun writing and publishing this first novel and I’ve no intention of stopping.

So that, in 8 blogs, is the story of a novel’s 2-year journey from NaNoWriMo 2010 to Amazon 2012. If there’s anything I haven’t covered, or that you’d like more info on, please add your comment and I’ll do my best to help.

After the beta feedback, I revised parts of The Syndrome Diaries and re-read the manuscript a couple of times. Firstly, when you change parts of a novel, you often find that another part stops making sense so you need to read through for continuity. Secondly, I was typo-spotting – assisted by Dad.

The decision to self-publish

Although I’d originally considered sending The Syndrome Diaries to an agent, by this point I’d decided to self-publish. There are several reasons why it was unlikely to be accepted:

The main characters aren’t particularly endearing. I think they’re interesting, but this doesn’t make them nice, so they’re difficult to sympathise with.

The conventions of particular genres aren’t followed. In regular women’s fiction, Ben would get his comeuppance for his attitude towards marriage, and Becky would live happily ever after by getting hitched and having children. Of course, there are plenty of women out there who are having wonderful lives without children (I count myself as one of them), but saying so still provokes controversy.

A female author and female narrator have led to the book being assumed to be women’s fiction, but the most favourable reactions among people who heard several extracts during its writing came from men. It’s a bit of a hermaphrodite of a book, so not commercial.

Additionally, if I was lucky enough to get a publishing contract, advances are small, timeframes are long and there’s no guarantee the book would actually get published, yet all my rights to the novel would be handed over. Writing would become a job rather than a hobby (my stint as a fitness instructor showed me what a bad idea that can be) and I love my academic career so don’t have any great motivation to be a full-time writer. On balance, it seemed better to head straight down the self-publishing route.

Formatting the manuscript for Amazon

I’ve read widely on self-publishing, and the most useful books I’ve found are Catherine Ryan Howard’s Self-printing and Ali Luke’s Publishing E-Books for Dummies. They’re both full of common sense and realistic advice rather than hyping themselves up to suggest you’ll be the next John Locke. I used Catherine’s advice on formatting the manuscript and Ali’s guidance on uploading and the various self-publishing options available.

Until the final proofing, I used Scrivener software with the novel template and a separate folder for each chapter. On several occasions, I compiled a mobi document from the manuscript for my Kindle so that I could read the book as an Amazon customer would (compiling a manuscript into a range of formats is one of Scrivener’s strengths). Scrivener made it easy to work through larger changes and edits, but once they were done, and the focus was on typos and grammatical glitches, it made sense to switch to Word. I followed Catherine’s advice in Self-Printing and stripped out the formatting, then applied styles throughout the document (this is a Word software function). I had different styles for chapter headings, for first paragraphs, for the main body of the text and for quotes (there are lots of extracts from a character’s diaries). The only change I made to Catherine’s advice was to use a 12-point font instead of a 10. Although you can adjust font size on a Kindle, it’ll adjust universally, so that if you are reading several books with differently-sized fonts, you have change the settings every time you switch between them. Size 12 font seemed to be more consistent with the other books on my Kindle. I also followed Catherine’s advice to produce the cover art: design it in Word, save it as a pdf and convert that to a jpeg.

I’d expected the formatting to take much longer than it did: it was done in a few hours. I checked it by pasting the entire manuscript back into a Scrivener document – not as separate chapters this time – and compiling it as a Kindle mobi. Most of it was fine, but some chapter headings weren’t formatted. I couldn’t find any reason in the Word document: they had the heading style attached. I got round the problem by pasting from a correctly-formatting chapter heading and changing the number.

At last…time to upload!

Amazon lets you upload a Word document and converts this to a mobi format for you. However, it has a reputation for misbehaving with the style formatting, and my experience was no exception. The first paragraph of a chapter shouldn’t be indented, and my Scrivener mobi was coming out fine. However, Amazon’s conversion indented every paragraph. I dealt with this by producing a Scrivener mobi and uploading that to Amazon instead of the Word document, and that got round the problem.

Apart from the formatting hiccup – which I’ll bypass next time by converting the doc to a mobi myself – uploading to Amazon is actually very quick and easy. The novel was available to download the next day. The final stage? Monitoring, marketing and moving on! That’ll be the subject of the final blog in this series.

If you’d like to look at the formatting of The Syndrome Diaries without buying it, you can download a fairly chunky free sample from Amazon by following the links on my website. Alternatively, for a couple of quid, you can have the whole book!

Having completed my novel rewrites and edits to the best of my abilities, it was time to let other people read it for the first time. By this stage, getting feedback on extracts was becoming less useful because they depended on familiarity with other parts of the novel. Did it make sense as a complete story?

The perfect beta reader is someone you trust to give you objective feedback on your book. My beta readers included a writer friend who’d given some fantastic feedback during the editing (I’ve since returned the favour by beta-reading for her), a keen reader who I’d met through a running forum and my parents (who are not inclined towards undeserved praise!).

Before my beta readers read The Syndrome Diaries (links to Amazon are on my homepage), we agreed what they were going to feed back on. I wanted to know whether the book hung together, and whether the characters and their actions made sense and were consistent. My Dad, for whom ambiguities and grammar slip-ups jump off the page, was also asked to note technical mistakes in the writing.

The feedback I received was just what I wanted. Overall, my beta readers were positive about the book while all finding issues that needed further work. Without giving spoilers, my post-beta edit included some character enhancement, adjusting some of the timings of events to make them more believable and sprinkling some extra clues through the text so that one of the later revelations wasn’t quite such a surprise. This is where the beta readers were particularly helpful: I thought the clues were there, but I’d been too subtle.

So, with the final changes made, the novel was almost ready for release. I’ll discuss the final stages of the process and the uploading to Amazon in another blog very soon.

In the meantime, I promised to keep you updated with Syndrome’s progress. The sales are still a trickle rather than a whoosh, but I’m thrilled that it’s selling. As yet, there are no reviews, but it’s still early days and I know of several people who are currently in the process of reading the novel. I haven’t done the marketing activity that I ought to have done, largely due to biting off way more than I could chew over the last couple of weeks and throwing a few personal issues into the mix. My head was permanently sticking over the parapet, and, at the risk of sounding self-indulgent, I needed a little bit of space to be nice to myself. Normal service is now restored.

I know that I need to switch my focus towards producing more books rather than worrying too much about what’s already out there (easier said than done), so I’m currently preparing to produce another draft novel in November with Nanowrimo. In December, I’m going to start editing a draft I already have. Although I wrote it 3 years ago, one of its themes ties in with the recently-published Bad Pharma which I’m just about to start reading. I’m looking forward to spending some time with Ed and Em, my main characters, who are rather less self-absorbed than Becky, Ben and India from The Syndrome Diaries.

And last of all, but by no means least, I must thank Pat for nominating me for Most Helpful Blogger award. This is the first time anything like this has happened, so it was a huge surprise, and fantastic to get positive feedback from someone whose blog I’m very fond of.

Hopefully today’s blog is helpful: please post if there are other things you think I should be covering or if you have any questions.

There comes a point where, if you’re serious about getting your writing out into the world, you have to let other people see it. The first time I did this, about 10 years ago, was on a writing course. I wasn’t ready for it. I’d written very little, wanted to learn more, but felt compelled to perform. The class format was to write something in maybe 10 or 20 minutes, read it out, and have it critiqued. After a day at work, an evening of word-churning and being bashed back down wasn’t really for me. And so began an avoidance of writing groups.

At the beginning of this year, I knew that had to change. I was well into the editing process with The Syndrome Diaries, and it was time to see what others made of my writing. I made it my New Year’s resolution to join a group.

My first reading was nerve-wracking. I remember getting to the end of the passage, and being met with silence. I thought that I must have written a pile of rubbish and everyone was wondering how to tell me. But then the comments began: helpful, constructive and largely positive. I went home feeling that my writing was OK, and, more importantly, that I could make it better.

Since then, I found a group much closer to home, so I’ve been able to go more regularly than I was able to with the first group. Over time, I’ve come to recognise different styles of feedback and, when comments conflict, I can select which is most useful (which is not necessarily the most flattering!). That in itself is a writing skill.

You can’t please everyone all the time and that can manifest itself rather energetically in a group; this is another lesson I’ve had to learn. One week, Ben’s behaviour in The Syndrome Diaries sparked a particularly heated debate. I wasn’t expecting it and worried that I’d upset others in the group, and that my plot was ‘wrong.’ This is one of the disadvantages of a group: you read extracts, and without the whole, it can be disorientating or appear that someone’s behaviour lacks motives. That’s where your beta readers come in, and that’s the subject of the next instalment of the ‘How to write a novel’ blogs.

But let’s not forget: while a writing group might be your critics, they’re also your champions. Last night, a group member told me she was part way through The Syndrome Diaries, and that she couldn’t put it down. That was the moment when I first realised that the effort I’d put into my writing was now bringing enjoyment to a reader. It’s a moment I’ll always remember, and it’s a moment that I wouldn’t have had without the writers’ group.

Earlier this year, I promised I was going to be open about the performance of The Syndrome Diariesonce it was published. However, the contract expressly forbids me sharing the content of Amazon sales reports, and I have to respect that if I don’t want to end up in deep legal do-do. I can tell you that I’m about at the point where, when the royalties arrive, I could buy myself a decent lunch here (my favourite café) and probably just about pay for a friend too. The worries I had – no sales at all, or a flurry of derogatory reviews – haven’t materialised.

The book has been available almost a week. People who expressed an interest while I was writing know the book is now available, although I haven’t exactly blitzed the marketing. Word of mouth is a key part of a book’s success, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that somebody out there will like it enough to put some little stars next to it on Amazon to help it on its way.

Reading the experiences of successful self-publishers, my current figures are pretty normal for this stage of the process, so I’m happy. The key to increasing the sales? More books! More writing! So that’s what I’m planning to do.

…I’ve published! The Syndrome Diaries has been available on Amazon for a couple of days now, and later blogs will describe the various hurdles jumped and glitches overcome to make that happen. In the meantime, if you want to have a nose at the finished product (or peruse the free sample), it’s here if you’re a UK reader and here if you’re in the US or most of the rest of the world. It’s also on the French site (click here ) and the German site (click here ): all versions are in English.

So. Rewriting.

I mentioned in my last blog that my first drafts tend to be full of plot without much description. Although the first rewriting stage should probably be the major changes – adding scenes, removing scenes, switching them around – my initial rewrite also made a lot of changes at the level below that. By the end of this process, my word count had almost doubled from the original 50,000 to just under 100,000.

I’ve included some before-and-after dialogue below to demonstrate the kinds of changes made: the dialogue has been fleshed out to try and tell the story in a more interesting way and to add more character to the people I’m writing about. This means I have to think hard about the individual personalities and motivations, and this might impact on the scenes if it becomes clear that someone is behaving out of character. They may need a new scene to explain some behaviour.

Here’s an extract from the original version. This is a few pages into the book, when my narrator, Becky, who’s a journalist, has just had a phone call from her editor asking her to do an interview with India Irving, a successful rock musician with whom she was once good friends. The two of them fell out at University and haven’t spoken for twenty years. Becky’s at home with her partner, Hugh, discussing the phone call:

“India wants me to interview her.”

“India?”

“Mm. I wonder what’s going on?”

“Maybe she wants to build some bridges.”

“Maybe. Wonder why?”

“Well, you can ask her, can’t you?” He was never interested in speculation, only empirical evidence.

It’s rather sparse, isn’t it? Those few lines were expanded and touches of detail added so that in the final version, the conversation is as follows:

‘India wants to do an interview.’

He looked up, puzzled, and nudged his glasses up his nose. ‘India who?’

‘Irving, of course.’ How many Indias were there?

‘I thought she wasn’t speaking to you.’

‘So did I. What do you think’s going on?’

‘Maybe she’s grown up.’

‘She’s got a new solo record coming out.’ I stood up to move my laptop away from the table before it got splattered with gravy.

He ran a hand through sandy-coloured hair, stopping to scratch the top of his head. ‘Well, that’s why she wants to talk to you, isn’t it? High profile journo, widely read by her target market.’

‘But why now?’

‘Dunno. You can ask her, can’t you?’ He was a scientist and speculation never got far with him. He needed empirical evidence, gold-plated with analyses of variance and linear regressions.

The conversation now provides an opportunity to describe Hugh a little more. The relationship between the two of them is tired, and the scene as a whole is peppered with suggestions of irritation and lack of engagement with each other. Hugh began as a catalogue of ‘boring bloke’ clichés but, as the editing progressed, these were cut back to enable him to emerge as a character with whom it was easier to sympathise. I won’t give away what happens with Hugh towards the end of the book, but hopefully what he does makes sense. On a technical note, the switch from double quotation marks to single ones came right at the final editing stage, and is to keep the style consistent with British conventions outlined in the Oxford Manual of Style.

Much of the rewriting involved this colouring and pacing of scenes, although there were also bigger changes and new scenes. Many of these came about when I began reading out my work at writers’ groups, and that will be the subject of my next blog on how to write a novel. I’ll also be posting on how The Syndrome Diaries is performing.

What are your thoughts on editing? Do you follow some kind of plan? Or is it a more ad hoc process?

I’ve found that the best way for me to write a first draft is to join in with NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. During November, Nanoers set themselves the task of writing a 50,000 word novel. The finished item is rough but somewhere in the scramble of words thrown at each day’s target might be the seeds of something special.

When I wrote the first draft of The Syndrome Diaries, it was as a Nanoer during November 2010. I’ve got a pretty good idea of how it went because I joined an online forum and can still access my posts.

On day 1, I was already over my target, and on day 2 even more so, something I attributed to the novel being ‘utter tripe’. I admitted I’d read back what I’d written, despite that being a Nano no-no: reviewing and revising is supposed to come later.

On day 3, I posted this extract:

“I admit I was a little bit in awe. I might have been a bit scared. No, not scared: anxious. I was anxious because there was obviously some reason for her wanting to talk to me, and I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t like turning up to an interview feeling like that. With most people, their agenda would be pretty obvious: sell more copies of their book or record, improve their image in the hope of getting more work, get more bums on seats for their play or film. If they had something unexpected they wanted to get on the record, then I could choose to listen to them, or to try and swing things round to something more word-worthy. I knew this would be different: how can things not be, with that much baggage? But I was not going to be pliable.”

If you find that a bit clumsy, then you’ll be relieved to know that almost nothing of that passage remains. But the rewrite preserved its intention: to convey my narrator Becky’s worries over a meeting with another main character, India (Becky’s a journalist, India’s a rock musician: they were once best friends but haven’t seen each other since an argument 20 years before). There are sections of the first draft that have survived intact to the final version, but most of it was edited beyond recognition. If you want to read the section where Becky and India meet up, you can do so here.

By the end of day 4 , I’d written nearly 8000 words.

On day 6, I recommended cola to the forum as an ideal toilet cleaner because of its limescale-shifting qualities. I stand by that assertion: why I was discussing it there, I have no idea. It’s certainly not mentioned in the final version of the novel.

On day 7, those on the forum shared their working titles: mine was the same as the final title. This doesn’t usually happen. My next novel will probably be The Illness (working title) or The One Night Stand (working title), and neither has what it takes to go on a book cover. But The Syndrome Diaries has always seemed to generate interest.

By the end of day 9, I was making good progress, although I assessed my efforts as ‘turgid crap.’ Nevertheless, there were hints that the novel-writing magic was starting to happen. I wrote about the characters worming their way into my brain when I should be thinking about other things. And once you start being sucked into the world of your characters, a wonderful sense of flow begins and the novel seems to write itself.

By day 12, the characters were taking on a life of their own and rebelling against my neat plan of what was supposed to happen. And that’s as it should have been.

On day 15, I read through what I’d got. Yes, I know that was against the rules, but my comments are interesting. My draft was heavily plot-biased without any pacing or description. I described it as hurtling down a motorway, rather than meandering through country lanes and enjoying the view. That’s how I draft: the colour and subtlety all comes later.

And on the 21st November, 2010, the first draft – at 50,165 words – was completed. I’ve never finished another NaNoWriMo so far ahead of schedule. Of course, it wasn’t remotely ready for publication (the final version is about 95,000 words). My last post for the year was on December 1st where I reported that I’d started rewriting – and that’s my subject for the next blog.

Do you write drafts fast or slowly? Have you taken part in Nanowrimo? Share your thoughts here!